The reason why use of the Linux desktop has never taken off has nothing to do with the operating system and everything to do with money.
“The desktop hasn’t really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas…,” said Linus Torvalds in April at the Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego. “I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”
Why, after 25 years, is the GNU/Linux desktop still near the bottom of the “market share” list of consumer operating systems? It’s certainly not due to quality. Those of us who use Linux on a regular basis and who have experience with other operating systems as well, pretty much agree it’s the best. We also know it to be an industry leader, with features showing up in desktop Linux years before they make their way into, say, Windows. By all rights, Linux should be known by techie and non-techie alike as the superstar of desktop operating systems.
So why hasn’t that happened? One word: marketing.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
FCC supports open source Wi-Fi firmware. For the last several months many open sourcers have been up in arms because it looked as if the door was being closed on open source on Wi-Fi routers after the agency changed it’s rules around radio interference on the 5 GHz band, making it difficult for router makers to allow users to install open source firmware on their routers. All along, the FCC claimed that shutting out open source use wasn’t part of the game plan, but we FOSSers are a suspicious lot and we weren’t buying it.
